Passing judgment on everything

Bad parenting and stealing trainers

I’ve held back on adding yet another ‘viewpoint’ to this already hyped-up and over-saturated blog market and media analysis on what has been happening in UK cities over the past 4 days, but I’ve just seen a Tweet that quotes Cameron as attributing some of the blame to bad parenting. I think this is the right time for me to document my views. Not necessarily for the mass market, and my views are certainly not fixed – I keep hearing differing opinions and experiences that make me re-think my position – but the issue of ‘parenting’ in the modern climate is something which I feel very strongly about.

I can’t quote exactly what Cameron said, I wasn’t listening at the time, but I can gauge the gist from what is being discussed now on Twitter in the aftermath of his second public address on the issues of the UK riots.

It’s no secret that I am an advocate of education, and that I feared youngsters would be priced out of education by the increase in fees and loss of EMA, so it comes as no surprise then that a small part of me wants to stand up for the kids who want an education, and who want to play an active part in society rather than be a statistic or a part of the “completely ignored underclass” as quoted by Camila Batmanghelidjh, founder of Kids Company in this wonderful article in today’s BBC coverage.

There is a view in many schools that teachers are left to do the work of parents with little or no back up from the parents or carers themselves, a view also touched on in the above BBC article, and I’ve been saying throughout the last few days that politicians seem to at best misunderstand and at worst be clueless about what really goes on in a large number of UK homes these days.

Calls by MPs and the Metropolitan Police for parents to ‘contact their kids’, ‘tell them to come home’ and to ‘ask them difficult questions about their whereabouts’ I fear were falling on deaf ears, confirmed by reports that some kids were out with their parents at the time, and my own knowledge and experience of families who are not interested in raising law-abiding and moral members of society, for a variety of reasons. I know mothers who steal alcohol for their daughters, who let them smoke pot, and who also smile and smirk at their offspring acquiring ASBOs or police warnings – all part of being a member of the “underclass”, a badge of honour that you are a notable member of that class, that you are succeeding. And a sure sign that they have no fear or belief in the justice system, no fear of consequence. Add to this the fear of the law felt by teachers and some parents for too long now, and I’m afraid to conclude we are now feeling the effects of them feeling powerless to discipline unruly children.

I appreciate those last few paragraphs may come off as an ‘awfully middle-class’ thing to say, but it’s my summary of the things I have seen ‘on the streets’; David Cameron and ‘Bumbling’ Boris Johnson – these are hard times, and it’s time to face the real but hard facts about just who is involved in your ‘Big Society’ vision.

There are some parents today who really don’t care where there kids are of an evening, as long as they are out from under their feet. Then there are parents who find themselves in tough positions because they have wound up with an army of offspring who they love and care for but do not have the support network themselves with which to provide a fulfilling and disciplined upbringing for their children.

I’ve worked with one such parent in Bristol. She is a single parent with no fewer than six children! No one could argue she doesn’t love her kids. No one could say she doesn’t try. But with a limited education herself she finds it hard to support her kids academically at home. She volunteers at all the kids’ schools and she tries to make up for her lack of academic support in other ways. But during an intervention meeting at one child’s school the representatives from all the Bristol authorities working with her family insisted she needed to take parenting classes. Great, a proactive step in empowering her with the tools to cope with the varying needs of all these children. Not so great when the class is held on the other side of Bristol at 3 o’clock in the afternoon. She has six kids, all of different ages, all needing care throughout the day. Do they offer a crèche for her while she attends the classes over the 12-week period? No, they don’t. So she is stuck in a self-perpetuating cycle of not being able to accept the help the school and the council think she should.

This is just one example of where the support network and the ideas of helping parents be better parents fall down, and this is before many of the cuts have kicked in, so let’s realise these problems are already in place, and I fear will only get worse over the coming years. This example also features a loving and aspirational Mother trying to do what she can to get by. This example excludes all those kids whose parents do not value education, maybe because they have no respect for the opportunity it brings, perhaps because they have never seen anyone achieve who comes from a similar background, or perhaps because they believe MPs and educators are all crooks and time wasters. We’ve uncovered at least four separate complex issues in this last paragraph alone which all need addressing individually and holistically.

I feel I’m doing a terrible job of articulating my thoughts, and the inspiration I felt in an instant to catalogue them post-Cameron’s speech. Anyone who follows me on Twitter will know I have made several conflicting points over the past few days, and my ‘standpoint’ (if there can ever be one) is ambiguous at best. But my belief in ensuring that all the systems are in place to support those who want support are in place is stronger now than it has ever been, and it’s not just about making sure fathers stick around. My dad didn’t. I still grew up ok. I funded my own education, ok I borrowed the money from the state to fund it, but I still had aspirations to improve opportunities. I have worked since I have been able to. There isn’t one inch of me that could find the reason or ability to steal a pair of trainers or set fire to someone’s home or business. But I do know how hard it is out there for parents and teachers, and we need to empower these people to become the driving force of ambition for the children of tomorrow. And this should be at the heart of whatever plans are hatched by Parliament tomorrow to deal with the issues uncovered in London, Birmingham, Manchester, Bristol, Gloucester…

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2 Responses

I think you’ve made a good stab of identifying part of the problem, but i see this as much more fundamental issue and not something that can be tackled in a few years.

My awareness of politics started with Thatcher. She, in my mind started us down this road or at least, speeded up the process, moving us from a community-based society to that of individualism. A society that’s every focus is on growing our market economy, supporting business at the expense of the needs and wants of the wider community. She succeeded in breaking trade unions, getting more parents (mothers mostly) into work, right to buy schemes… many things that on the face of it people thought were good, but in fact put more and more pressure on the areas this blog discusses.

Then we have New Labour. By now, Thatcher’s policies are established, greed has become a good thing, people are working longer and longer hours, family life has become the victim. Labour improve our individual rights, with the help of the EU. But again, these individual rights are not in existence because they are right in themselves, they exist to get more people into work. I have sat in a meeting discussing the rights and needs of Asian women chaired by Trevor Phillips, where the discussion was about best ways to get them back to work. The problem of Asian women stuck at home, often with a poor knowledge of English and abused by their family, is an issue in itself, but it was only thought of as a problem worth tackling because those women were prevented from working.

We now have Government that only has eyes for the economy, that tells it citizens that not to work makes you morally bankrupt. We have businesses that serve themselves and not the local community, everything is about the bottom line. This is why rural communities struggle as the businesses have moved away. It is why the media lost their way, as they were only focused on the money they were making. It is no surprise, therefore, that we have reached a point as we have seen this week. Those who serve the economy have eroded away so many of the good things we used to have in its wake.

Anyway, you get the idea of where I am going with this, tackle the macro problem and we may have a chance of tackling the rest of it.

I would have to agree with many of the things said there, to be fair, the loss of EMA has definitely impacted my decision of college as they charge an awful amount in fee’s for trips and recources. EMA should be arranged so that you can only receive it if your familys earnings are under the poverty line, (the last time I checked it was £10K per year). And I also agree that it is down to bad parenting. Parents should have taughht their children right from wrong and they should know that careless vandalism and theft is wrong on so many levels. Futhermore, parents should know where their children are and should keep them home if they had ANY doughts that’s they where going to go and join in with the riots. D xxx